Perry Mason: The Case of the Vagabond Virgin

Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, 1957 - 1966. Yes,
he's in black-and-white; color not yet invented.

          All of your old friends are here (if you are over 50 or so): Perry Mason, Della Street, Paul Drake, Hamilton Burger, and Lieutenant Tragg. We know them well from the television show Perry Mason that ran from 1957 to 1966. It was a favorite of my mom's and if she watched it, I probably did, too. (Yes, I first watched Star Trek with my mom, who was attracted to Captain Kirk.) Mason, the defense attorney, used every nuance of law, every scrap of a right or privilege, every possible interpretation of statute. The 1948 book The Case of the Vagabond Virgin, by Erle Stanley Gardner, has it all--familiar characters and savvy law--along with a juicy murder to solve.

Hamilton Burger, prosecutor; Lt. Tragg police
detective; Della Street, legal secretary; Perry
Mason, defense attorney; and Paul Drake, private
investigator (left to right)

          Vagabond Virgin at last satisfies my desire for a literate mystery that follows the classic rules thereof. Nothing is wasted in this book. Almost every detail--from appearance, clothing, casual utterances, make and model of car, everything--has a direct bearing upon the plot, upon the resolution of the murder mystery. It all becomes a big Bucky ball of causality and inference.

           The Perry Mason books are pot-boilers--somewhat gritty, delving into the seamier neighborhoods, and quite frank about sexuality. This one was urban with forays into the countryside. There is wry wit that often leads to a realization. And the characters are sharply drawn. I knew what each character looked like (not just the ones I knew from TV) and appreciated their personalities. The pace was fast, snappy. I had to keep my brain on or I missed things. It was clear that Gardner was an attorney and that he scoured statutes and case law to build his intricate plots. Mason is a bit on the shifty side...some of his projects border on illegal/unethical practice. But Mason's facility with the law keeps him in the clear every time.

Warren William as Perry Mason in a 1935 film

          In Vagabond Virgin, a businessman is accused of killing his partner. A hitch-hiking young woman is the alibi--or is she? The titular heroine engages in self-exploitation for money, playing the innocent virgin with drivers that pick her up. Her virginal story is so woebegone that the drivers press money (rather than their attentions) upon her.The partner's ex-wife and a mysterious reporter also figure into things. The final resolution of the plot occurs when Mason actually engages in meta-cognition (thinking about how you think) and realizes that he has accepted a batch of assumptions without checking their validity. He rethinks the case from its origins and comes up with a solution that leads to an amazing bit of courtroom drama. The criminals definitely get their comeuppance (also a standard of classic mystery).

         It's fun to be the reader sitting on Mason's shoulder throughout this book, seeing the inside of his maneuverings, getting the inside dope that the police and suspects do not have. The Mason team (Della, Paul, and even Gertie at the switchboard) work smoothly and efficiently, questioning Mason, but generally doing exactly as he directs. He doesn't always disclose all to them, not like he does to his reader.

Erle Stanley Gardner, 1889 - 1970. He worked with a
a group in California that sought to overturn convictions
that came about through inept legal representation.

          Erle Stanley Gardner is a masterful storyteller with a confident and unapologetic world view. Mason does not anguish when he bends the rules. The sexual escapades of the characters (not Mason!) are accepted as is--more faulted for their execution than for their morality. This is refreshing--I'm a bit tired of characters agonizing and self-excoriating, and regretting and seeing both sides of question. (I'm tired of doing it myself!) Mason's certainty and willingness to just move forward with the ends justifying the means keep the books about him cerebral and satisfying--just like a mystery novel (which is NOT real life) should be! Mason is not damaged or changed. He operates as a sort of matrix through which the plot operates and resolves, but is not used up--he's the catalyst, not a reactant.

1940s cover--the book is a
bit risque

          Some of the Perry Mason movies are pretty good. I saw one recently that starred Warren William as Mason and was made in 1935. It had a 1920s New York-type setting (lots of action in high-rises and lots of cabs). William's Mason was quite droll and a bit decadent, which is a bit truer to the books than perhaps the TV series is. Although I am still filtering the TV series through my child-self memories--"adult" content may have gone right over my head. I do remember one episode where someone said "cherche la femme" to Mason. I didn't know what it meant, but I remember Mason's face being tired and melancholy when the line was said.

          If I had more Mason mysteries, I would certainly read them. The Case of the Vagabond Virgin was a delightful diversion from reality and took me into another world. I think that's the true goal of a murder mystery. It's a genre about right and wrong, innocent and guilty, wit versus stupidity. The good and the smart triumph. It's not reality--but it's OK to take a break now and then. I recommend Perry Mason in all of its forms--book, radio, and TV.

Monster and Self-Defense by Jonathan Kellerman

Why Did I Read These?
These two Kellerman mystery novels came to my house with a batch of books from friends who were moving. These beloved friends had so many wonderful books from throughout their long lives--on poetry, religion, civil rights, inspiration, literature (got a wonderful shelf of Dickens), art, music. Somehow, two modern paperbacks by Kellerman ended up in the mix of musty-yellowed pages, crumbling bindings, and venerated authors. I haven't discovered yet why the anomalous novels were part of the collection, but because they stood out as such oddities, I of course decided to read them first. I am going to contend in this blog post that Jonathan Kellerman is not venerated.

Airport Books
Neither Monster (1999) nor Self-Defense (1995) is about an airport. Both are, however, New York Times best sellers according to red stripes across the covers. It is further noted on the covers that each book is "An Alex Delaware Novel." Each book is about 500 pages long. Airport books. People getting on airplanes want neither slender volumes nor future doorstops...the book must last just long enough, but not too long. That's about 500 pages.

Padded Books
Now, I have been on many airplanes where I needed more padding, but not in my reading material. Both of these books seemed artificially long to me, like the text had been cut apart and irrelevant detail added in for length--maybe not even by the original author. The padding was distracting and slowed these books way down, killed the tension. Every single character, no matter how minor, was described in detail--face, makeup, hair, clothing, skin, hands, mannerisms, size, smell. And so were locations--trees, street names, directions to places, type of building, color of building, condition of lawn, parking of the car. The long driving sequences were burdened with detail that was just detail. Perhaps the driving directions were supposed to give a sense of reality or authenticity, but I think if you don't live in Los Angeles (the setting for both books) you don't really care and if you do live in Los Angeles, you just need a few hints, not a map. I could trace on an L.A. street map every single location. It was too much.

Meanwhile, back in the mystery...what, we are in the middle of a mystery? I thought we were in a travel book. And that's the real criticism, that the wordiness and padding removed me from the plot for such long periods of time that I had to flip backward in the book to find out what was going on! And, you know my rules for classic mystery--no detail should be extraneous. If something is mentioned, it should have direct relevance to either theme or plot and preferably both. (Thank you, Dorothy L. Sayers.)

Series Cystitis
Yes, here comes another one of my modern-mystery pet peeves. Because this book is part of an ongoing series, we endured strange digressions that would only be relevant to someone who had read the previous book or books. I guess that ensures continuity for regular readers. But regular readers would get subtle hints. Surely these whacks over the head are as annoying to regulars as they are to first time readers. These backflashes (not flashbacks) were yet another impediment to getting this book going, getting it to work, getting it to do its job as a mystery and a "good read." Itch-itch. Cystitis.

Dr. Sherlock Freud
Alex Delaware is a psychologist who consults for the police. He pairs up with a detective who is GAY, it is noted several times (I think only as yet another backflash and so we women readers don't get too attached.) Milo's gayness is really irrelevant to his character as a friend and police detective, as it should be. Alex is aggressively heterosexual as we know from his fade-to-black encounters with his cute wife. (So we women can fantasize about him.) Really, the wife is totally irrelevant to this book--I bet she's part of the series cystitis, from a previous book or two back, needing to be updated.

Alex (female) Kingston as Dr. Who's River Song--
"Love a tomb!"

For the whole book Monster, I thought first-person narrator Alex Delaware was a woman. This impression comes from the murderous level of detail about furnishings and fashion, which are much more typical of a romance than a mystery; and from the ambiguity of the name itself. It's so trendy to have masculine-named heroines these days. Delaware's thought process are not earth-shattering, neither is his therapy. He flunks the Sherlock and Freud tests!

In Self-Defense, there is a long sequence of hypnosis and age-regression that was pretty miraculous. Delaware age-regressed the client to particular days and times of day. It was presented as a mundane therapeutic process. Maybe it is in California. It helped move the plot along.

Multi-Murders
These books would have been well-plotted if the extraneous material had been removed. Individual scenes were quite tense and spooky and the settings were creepy. Much of Monster was set in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. I still feel claustrophobic thinking about it. Self-Defense was less atmospheric until the action moved to an old estate that had formerly been a nudist and then an artist colony. You could almost smell the dead bodies under the turf.

You are getting very sleepy...

Monster involved some ritualistic deaths that ended up tying together many loose ends about a brutal murder from decades before. The killer was locked up in the asylum. The trail was a mass of red herrings leading, as in both books, all over southern California. The outcome was a bit pedestrian (no, it wasn't the butler, but  it was pretty predictable), but satisfying.

Self-Defense introduced a young woman who was having bad dreams. Milo brought her to Delaware for treatment. She and Milo had connected during a trial of a brutal mass murderer. The mass murdered was only in the book to justify the heroine's bad dreams (and maybe to bring in some gruesome shock-scenes). From clues in her dreams, a whole series of murders is disclosed. The ending is obscure. I never did get the title's significance.

Victimized and victim women were prominent in each book. Many men were killed also, but never with as much detail and fear. Milo and Delaware were the ones who kept their heads and restored women to wellness. Both books featured multiple deaths--at least five main deaths each and many others mentioned. This seems totally unrealistic to me and, pardon the phrase, overkill (!). 

No one ever really smiled when using the
microfiche machine--it was a pain in the hiney.

Pace of Change
These books are from 15-20 years ago and boy do they show it. They come across as modern, except for the hilarity of their technology. Pay phones. Answering machines. Microfiche. Researching at the library. So quaint. I leave it to you to ponder whether these mysteries would even be possible in today's age of instantly transmitted photography, rapid information retrieval, and inter-connectedness.



Conclusion
I struggled through these books, but I don't recommend them, even for airports. Stick with John Gresham or Pat Cornwell. Maybe I'm just not easily amused, said Queen Victoria. Like my first experiences with Chinese food, my first experiences with mysteries were of the best and everything else is a bit of a comedown. We soldier on.